Plus, AI is a subject of current event interest. (Lookin’ at autocorrect programs…) Meanwhile, I got a great deal of nerdy pleasure reading this, and I hope all who read, do as well!
Typos Have Plagued Us for Centuries. Just Ask the Publishers Who Printed the Seventh Commandment as ‘Thou Shalt Commit Adultery’ in 1631
A new exhibition at Yale Library explores the history of typos across five centuries. Visitors will see corrections that were listed inside copies of works by James Joyce, Upton Sinclair and Nicolaus Copernicus
Sonja Anderson – Daily Correspondent
A 1631 copy of the Bible that includes the text “Thou shalt commit adultery.” Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
James Joyce wrote the manuscript of Ulysses with a steel pen over seven years. By his typists’ accounts, the Irish author’s penmanship was atrocious, and his revisions were overwhelming. When the book was published in 1922, it was full of mistakes. In a letter to his wife, he wrote, “The edition you have is full of printer’s errors.”
The following year, Joyce’s editors compiled a massive list of the book’s errors to be fixed in new editions. Joyce rejected some of the corrections, saying, “These are not misprints but beauties of my style hitherto undreamt of.” Even so, some future printings of the book came with a seven-page errata sheet listing more than 200 mistakes.
Errors like those in Ulysses are the subject of a new exhibition at Yale. “‘Beauties of My Style’: Errata and the Printed Mistake,” which opens at the university’s Sterling Memorial Library on March 30, examines the history of typos across five centuries.
“What we found was that errata sheets were not only spaces for corrections but also sites of humor, legal maneuvering and reinterpretation,” Rachel Churner, a visual studies scholar at the New School and the exhibition’s co-curator, tells Artnet’s Min Chen. “With this exhibition, we wanted to share ways in which even small corrections can reshape meaning and authority.”
According to a statement from the library, “errors committed” lists first appeared in the 15th century. Authors slipped these lists—containing typos, additions and apologies—into the backs of books after publication. The exhibition examines errata lists alongside their companion texts, examining themes of “censorship, misrepresentation, intervention and instability,” per the statement.
An errata slip from an early printing of James Joyce’s Ulysses Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
The exhibition spotlights around 30 artifacts from the collection of Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Items on display include “inaccurate maps, book corrections and religious texts with very grave typographic blunders,” reports Artnet.
In addition to the errata slip from Ulysses, visitors can see several other 20th-century examples, including a self-published copy of Upton Sinclair’s 100 Percent: The Story of a Patriot, in which he “mistakenly identified a founding member of the Communist Party of America as a government agent,” per Fine Books & Collections. Also on view is a fold-out errata from Allen Ginsberg’s 1968 Airplane Dreams. According to the statement, he included the error sheet as a “legal strategy for political resistance.”
Churner and her co-curator Geoff Kaplan, a graphic designer at the Yale School of Art, co-founded the publishing company No Place Press. As they researched errata at the Beinecke, they found “unexpected poetry,” Churner tells Artnet.
Wade & Croome’s Panorama of the Hudson River From New York to Albany, published in 1846, listed Fishkill Village’s population as 11,000 instead of 800. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
The exhibition features an infamous 1631 edition of the Bible, which lists “Thou shalt commit adultery” as the Seventh Commandment. (The omission of the word “not” earned this edition the nickname “the Wicked Bible.”) By the time the mistake was discovered, 1,000 copies had been printed. The British king Charles I reprimanded the publishers, fined them £300 and stripped them of their printing license. In the centuries that followed, rumors circulated speculating that a rival printer had introduced the error. But as Chris Jones, a medieval studies scholar at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, told the Guardian’s Eva Corlett in 2022, the more likely explanation is that the printers hadn’t wanted to spend money on copy editors.
Nearly all the Wicked Bibles were destroyed, and only about 20 known copies survive. In the copy on view at the Beinecke, someone fixed the error by hand, adding “not” to “Thou shalt commit adultery.”
In some cases, corrections have been used to influence public perception. During the Reformation in the 16th century, books were released describing “mistranslations” of Protestant and Catholic Bibles, “mobilizing the errata well beyond a list of typographic corrections,” Churner tells Artnet.
Plat Maps of Appanoose County, Iowa, 1986 Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Visitors will also see two copies of On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (1543) by astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus. They include an anonymous preface that “corrects” the author’s view of heliocentrism—the idea that the Earth revolves around the sun—as a “hypothesis.”
Many other errors, however, are simple mistakes. For example, the exhibition features a 1986 book of Iowa maps with a note correcting a mislabeled township. “Dear Sir, or Madam,” it reads, “We goofed in the Appanoose County Plat Book.”
“‘Beauties of My Style’: Errata and the Printed Mistake” will be on view at Yale University’s Sterling Memorial Library in New Haven, Connecticut, from March 30 to November 29, 2026.
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